Deep below the surface is nothing but darkness, and the biolminsecent mushrooms in the occasional cavern don’t do much to cut through the gloom. It’s almost completely quiet and still until the forgotten golem Otto reactivates, and an activated golem very quickly becomes a busy golem. With nothing better to do it starts tidying up the area, collecting rubble and branches from the floor and chipping away at a vein of iron poking out of the wall. Rock makes a nice smelter, wood provides the fire, and the iron ore melts down into ingots. The cave is still dark and the golem can’t yet venture far from where it awoke, but it’s a start.
Majestic subterranean cathedrals or waste space to be filled with interconnected machinery?
AutoForge is a 2D side-view automation game that only recently wrapped up its Kickstarter run, clearing its goal last September thanks to a solid demo that provided a couple hours of play. Starting off in the dark you convert a network of caves into an automation empire, pneumatic tubes zipping supplies through an ever-expanding network that makes perfect sense to the one who built it but looks like a nightmare tangle to anyone else. It takes a bit to get going, of course, but the world is large and filled with resources and the caverns easily terrformed into a shape much more convenient for a factory. Rather than ore veins running through the rock, though, most raw materials are hanging on the back wall.
Building an Automation Base in the Caverns of AutoForge’s Kickstarter Demo
The earliest drills are all hand-cranked, each one covering a two-by-two square of wall and holding its energy for a couple of minutes before needing to be re-cranked. When you’ve got a small pile of wood, stone, and metal deposits it can be a lot to keep track of, but like any automation game the goal is to do more with less work as the factory grows. Cranked drills give way to combustion, which can be auto-fed by running wood-filled tubes everywhere, while various assemblers are happier with a wireless electric network. As the systems get bigger they also become almost self-sustaining, and while resources aren’t infinite they’re plentiful enough that you don’t need to babysit the production lines too closely. Keeping an eye out for swarms as the planet gets a sense of what you’re up to and decides to put a stop to it may require some initial attention, but like any good system the defenses can be automated too.
The time from Kickstarter to game can frequently be measured in years but AutoForge is just about ready for its Early Access debut. The release date trailer dropped today and it’s a bit over a month off, coming to Steam on March 27. You can check out the reveal trailer below, butthe demo is also liveand has had a few good updates in the months since the Kickstarter ended. Otto may not start with much, but the caves have everything the golem needs to automate his way into the world and find out why it was lost.
